Cambodia

The mission of Five Tuition is to help students to be successful in school and life. We help students by offering them personalised and small-group coaching in a variety of different subjects.

While our main mission field is local in Melbourne’s West, we are also keen to lend a hand to other communities that face challenging circumstances. Through a local NGO, we are supporting students and their families living in rural areas of Battambang, Cambodia. A key challenge faced by these areas is access to education.

Cambodia: Improving Access to Education for Rural Communities

The Khmer Rouge occupation in the 70s claimed roughly two million lives or about 25% of the population. Because education was a threat to the Khmer Rogue’s vision for a classless rural society, they destroyed schools or converted them to spaces for agricultural production. The learned and those associated with institutionalised learning were killed or died due to disease and starvation. Apparently, those who wore glasses were primary targets. With many of the country’s surviving intellectuals fleeing the country, a massive brain drain ensued.

The regime were eventually overthrown by Vietnamese forces, but the damage was severe.

Supported by local and international NGOs and under the leadership of the ministry, the educational system has made remarkable progress over the last few decades.

Yet, there’s much more work to be done. An international study done a few years ago reports that almost three-quarters of 15-year-olds are not in school. Among those in school, 90% were found to be below the basic competency level [1]. Needless to say, the schools that face the greatest disadvantage are rural schools where resources are scarce: electricity, clean drinking water, and toilets.

Through local NGO Children’s Action for Development, we have offered scholarships to 22 children from across four rural schools in the past two years. The purpose of the scholarship is to encourage them to stay in school. Scholarships typically comprise school uniforms, stationery and bicycles. Children in rural communities often live far from school and bicycles offer a only feasible mode of transport for these children.

To find out more about Children’s Action for Development, please click here.

[1] MoEYS (2018). Education in Cambodia: Findings from Cambodia’s experience in PISA for Development. Phnom Penh

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We are always on the lookout for ways to help individuals and communities facing temporary or long-term disadvantage.

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